Loaded: The drug-moving supersub

The sub was discovered on July 2, 2010, in an Ecuadorian jungle estuary

Christoph Morlinghaus

This article was taken from the May 2011 issue of Wired
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For decades, Colombian drug runners have pursued their trade with diabolical
ingenuity, always staying a step ahead of authorities by coming up
with one innovation after another. When false-panelled pickup
trucks and tractor trailers began attracting suspicion at US
checkpoints, the cartels and their Mexican partners
built air-conditioned tunnels under the border. When border agents
started rounding up too many human mules, one group of Colombian
smugglers surgically implanted heroin into purebred puppies. But
the drug runners' most persistently effective method has also been
one of the crudest -- semi-submersible vessels that cruise or are
towed just below the ocean's surface and can hold a tonne or more
of cocaine.

Assembled in secret shipyards along the Pacific coast, they've
been dubbed drug subs by the press, but they're incapable of diving
or manoeuvring like real submarines. In
fact, they're often just cigarette boats (small, fast boats with
narrow platforms and planing hulls) encased in wood and fibreglass
that are scuttled after a single mission. Yet, despite their
limitations, these semi-submersibles are notoriously difficult to
track. US and Colombian officials estimate that the cartels have
used them to ship hundreds of tonnes of cocaine from Colombia over
the past five years alone.

But several years ago, intelligence agencies began hearing that
the cartels had made a technological breakthrough: they were
constructing some kind of super-sub in the jungle. According to
the persistent rumours, the phantom vessel was an
honest-to-goodness, fully functioning submarine with vastly
improved range -- nothing like the disposable water coffins the
Colombians had been using since the 90s. US law enforcement
officials began to think of it as a sort of Loch Ness monster, says
one agent. "Never seen one before, never seized one before. But we
knew it was out there."

Finally, the Ecuadoreans had enough information to launch a
fully fledged raid. On July 2, 2010, a search party -- including
those three police helicopters, an armada of Ecuadorean navy patrol
boats and 150 well-armed police and sailors -- scoured the
coastline near the Colombian border. When a patrol boat happened on
some abandoned barrels in a clearing off the Río Molina, the posse
moved in to find an astillero, or jungle shipyard, complete with
spacious workshops, kitchens and sleeping quarters for 40. The raid
had clearly interrupted the work day -- rice pots from breakfast
were still on the stove.

And there was something else hastily abandoned in a narrow
estuary: a 22.5 metre camouflaged submarine -- nearly twice as long
as a bus -- with twin propellers and a 1.5-metre conning tower,
beached on its side at low tide. "It was incredible to find a
submarine like that," says rear admiral Carlos Albuja, who oversees
Ecuadorean naval operations along the north-west coast. "I'm not
sure who built it, but they knew what they were doing."